


i will show you fear (in a handful of dust)

by orphan_account



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Angst, Fake AH Crew, Letters, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-22
Updated: 2015-06-22
Packaged: 2018-04-05 13:29:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4181595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>"You were not soft. You have never been. You have always been very good at pretending to be things you are not. I am not sure if I ever trusted you." </em>
</p><hr/><p>When Ryan first met Gavin, he never imagined he would be so broken by his death. And yet, when his comrade meets an untimely end, Ryan finds himself here, in the midst of a panic attack, frantically writing a letter to the dearly departed. Before too long, he cannot bring himself to stop writing letters to a man who will never receive them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i will show you fear (in a handful of dust)

**1**.

You were the only one who could help me through my panic attacks, back when I first started working for you guys. You would breathe with me for however long I needed, never once complaining – we were not friends, not yet, but you had done me a kindness I had never seen before.

Sorry if you cannot read my writing.

I cannot keep my hands from shaking.

 **2**.

When I had first started with Fake AH, none of you trusted me. Geoff likes to pretend otherwise – likes to act as if the crew has always been warm and welcoming.

It was easy to be warm with Lindsay and Kdin, when they gave you so much back. Lindsay has always been kind, sunshine in this city of ash. Kdin is sour but in the way that we have come to crave, from both him and Ray. Fake AH Vinegar, we used to call it.

It was not easy with me. I was not what you all had expected. You were expecting rough around the edges but a heart of gold. A man who was often lied about. You were expecting something, or rather, someone else. I wish I was sorry I disappointed you. I like to think that, in time, I have softened. For all of you. It was simple with Jack, to come undone in careful hands; even with Michael and Ray, in whom I saw of kindred spirits.

It was harder, with you and Geoff. The two of you have always been bursting with life, even before we officially met – I had been hired, once, to take the both of you out. Hullum, too.

You never asked how I came to knew where the Corpirate was hiding, after all.

I had never thought twice about a job before you three. You were nothing. Pests. It should have been easy.

But I saw the way Matt softened around the two of you, the way you so easily mellowed the man I had then known would one day become one of the biggest crime lords in Los Santos. There was something innocent to the three of you, then. Something innocent in your childish excitement and Geoff’s laughter, something I couldn’t quite stomach.

I could not kill you.

And I was scared of that, scared of the two of you. You had broken me without realizing it, and that was dangerous.

But as you helped me breathe and Geoff tried to find me a place in his life, I softened. How could I not have, after all?

In the beginning, we were sent out on a job. Something about Coal. It was perilous, and there was a likelihood that we would get caught. We would not have died. There were people working for Coal that Geoff and Jack had paid off, to keep us safe. We did not know that.

Before we left, you asked Ray not to forget you.

It was then that I saw what made me afraid of you to begin with. You still seemed innocent, in a way. I knew you were not. You were sharp and damaged, methodical and cunning. You could have slit my throat and wiped away any trace of my existence without a moment’s notice. Would have, if I had given you a reason, probably.

You were not soft. You have never been.

You have always been very good at pretending to be things you are not.

I am not sure if I ever trusted you.

 **3**.

Ray called me, today. Asked if I had tried to save you, when Jack and I found you. I did not know what to say. Should I have told him the truth?

You were dead long before we arrived. I would have liked to have been able to tell him that it was instant, but it was not. You bled out, slowly. You were awake until the very last moment. You suffered and you were alone with nothing but the weight of your unconscious best friend to keep you company.

I told him I was sorry.

What else could I have said?

Please, tell me. I do not know what to say. I do not know which words will make him bleed and which will give him hope. You once told me that empathy is a quality I do not possess, but one that I could, in time, make my own. I have not yet mastered it.

I need you to help me.

I need you to be here.

 **4**.

You deserve more than death at twenty seven years old.

 **5**.

Geoff asked me to think of an epigraph for your tombstone.

I cannot think of a single phrase that describes your life. I need thousands upon thousands. You are a paradox, complex in your simplicities. I want to be able to say something beautiful, to give the world something to remember you by. I do not want you to be dearly beloved, because you were more than that.

I eventually settled on _a good man_.

You were not a good man. You killed fathers and mothers and never once looked back. You broke families up without a second thought. You were a monster, in the way that we are all monsters.

But you were the monster under the bed, one that never leaves. You were always there, a constant presence that some would think frightening, and others comforting. I would be lying to say that I am not glad to be able to look under my bed and find nothing but my shotgun.

Michael once called you the sun.

I have found that you are the moon, rarely full. You are always hiding some part of yourself from the human eye. We could only see the real you, the _full_ you, in fleeting moments, too fleeting for something so terrifyingly beautiful.

I wonder, were you tired? Of always hiding?

I am tired of always trying to find you.

 **6**.

I suppose it is time where I admit: you were correct about the coins. To flip three coins in succession skews the results from 50/50. It was childish of us, I think, to argue over this – we both knew the other was correct. We were arguing different arguments.

We have always been on different wavelengths, I think. Similar, at our cores, but different for all outward appearances. Michael once asked me why I wanted to befriend you, in particular, after I had hushed my fears. I didn’t have an answer – I had seen you with him, with Ray, with Geoff; I had seen the way you shifted from a changeling to a little boy, in over his head. A part of me, I think, wanted that for my own.

For all I have said about you, there was a part of you, I think, that still rang true to the British boy that had stolen Michael Burns’ heart for his own.

Burnie told me once that you still haven’t returned it.

I am not sure if he wants it back, any more.

We all want you to have something to remember us all by. Jack had suggested that we leave you with possessions of ours, the way they did back in Ancient Egypt. I wanted to. I was going to leave you an old mask of mine, the one my mother made for me, before she had been taken.

We decided not to, eventually. It would not have felt right without Ray.

Once, you asked me if I believed in the afterlife. I told you then that I did not know. I still do not, really. I would like to. I would like to be able to tell Ray that your last moment was not suffering; that you are still living, somewhere, just waiting for him to return home, to the hollow concave between your shoulder and neck.

I want to believe that there is an afterlife.

I want to believe that you are alive, somewhere.

I want to believe that you still remember us, remember all that we have been through.

 **7**.

We buried you today. My hands still will not stop shaking.

You once made fun of my inability to use contractions when writing, and of my strange tone. It was a hollow victory for you, after we had long-made fun of your strange speech patterns, inherited from your home country. Most traces from my life in Russia are long gone, but there are habits I cannot quite shake just yet.

You have noticed more of them than anyone else has.

I am not sure what I set out to accomplish with this letter. I suppose I wanted to let you know that I miss you. We all do, I think. We are all writing little letters to you, in our spare time.

I think Geoff’s written an entire notebook to you.

Did you know that this would happen? Did you see this coming, when you bowled Michael over in order to save him from the grenade? Did you see us falling apart? Tell me, are you enjoying the show?

My hands are still shaking.

Geoff will yell at me tomorrow, when he realizes how much whiskey I have spilt.

I am tired, Gavin. I am so incredibly tired and I want to sleep.

I haven’t slept in weeks, now. Not since I found you, cold and dead, on top of your unconscious best friend. Michael doesn’t like to sleep without me. I cannot bring myself to crawl into the bed with him and Lindsay, to wrap my arms around him and remind him that everything is okay. I do not know that everything will be. I still cannot lie to the ones whom I love.

 **8**.

Lindsay asked me today why I am so shaken by your death.

We all knew how to lie for the crew, bleed for the crew, die for the crew – but we were more than just a crew, I think. We were a family. We would have done anything for one another, go to any length to keep us all safe. We all knew all-too well the dangers, what could happen to us all. We were the most dangerous men in Los Santos: there was no way we were all going to walk away at the end of all this alive.

I don’t think any of us ever considered that it would be you that would die first.

Whilst not necessarily hard to believe that you would die a young death – I remember you once telling me that you would die in the way of a Greek hero, young and in your prime – I had thought that Ray would perhaps keep you alive, with the promise of a better future on the horizon.

I would have liked to have seen you and Ray grow old with one another. I know the two of you were planning to leave, soon. Ray was growing bored with what the Fake AH Crew stood for, and wherever he went, I knew you would follow. The two of you would have lived a beautiful life together.

I suppose I am shaken by your death because it has reminded me how easily what we have fought for can be stolen from us. I am shaken by your death because you were like a younger brother to me. I am shaken by your death because you could have lived a wonderful life, but you died at twenty seven years old and you deserve far more than that.

 **9**.

I wanted to let you know that I have always appreciated you.

I have said some terrible things in these letters to you, I know this well. They are all things that I would say to your face, if only I had the chance – this, I think, is why I have felt no guilt over the things I have written to you.

I wish you were here still, as I would like to tell you these things.

There are many things I would like to tell you, now. They were correct, you know, when they told us we would never know what we have until it is gone.

I have said this too much: you deserved more than this, this mockery of a death. You died to save your best friend, and of course, this was a honourable death. But it was not a death that was befitting of you, was it? You were not a brave man, nor were you honourable.

You are still a paradox: strong through your cowardice.

 **10**.

Russia was not kind to me, in the same way England was not kind to you. There are days where I wonder if we were ever that different, after all. Jack said to me a while ago that he had always seen the two us as two sides of the same coin: unalike, but still the same, in a way.

It has been a while since I last wrote to you.

Geoff still writes in his little journal, sometimes. I assume that Ray is still crafting you letters, too. We have not heard from him in a while. Michael has tried and tried to help him, but I do not think that Ray wants to hear from any of us, least of all Michael. I cannot bring myself to blame him. The two of you, you had built yourself a future together and it is gone because you were able to be strong for your little Mogar when the rest of us could not.

Thank you.

I have called you a coward, a monster, a threat. I have seen you as a mystery yet to be solved, a ruthless killer. I have never seen you as a good man, and yet, that is all I can think of you as. We have never been the good guys – and I remember that we all had been, once, before coming to Los Santos and losing whatever goodness had been left in our hearts; and yet, I can still envision you up in Heaven or its’ otherworldly companion, at home amongst the Saints taken too soon from this world.

You have proven me wrong so many times, and I have never done well with being proven wrong. I wish you were here to prove me wrong again, with your half-witted logic and wide sphere of knowledge.

I am so sorry, Gavin. You deserved more than this. We all deserve more than _this_.

– Ryan.


End file.
